Notes on the Geography of Pakistan: Lahore: the Old City

Lahore's Old City--about one square mile--has 20,000 apartments, 38,000 households, 260,000 people, and 4,300 commercial enterpries. You can't stand numbers? So we'll take a look. But for those who thrive on digits, we'll mention first that Thornton and Kipling's Lahore, from 1876, says that the old city has 20,000 houses and 92,000 people. If both sets of numbers are to be believed, then the population of the old city has roughly tripled in the last 125 years, while the number of residences has remained steady. The Lahore Directory for 1914 tends to corroborate these numbers and gives the Old City's population as 114,000.

Just off the road, an old, no-longer-operational bath house. See the dome?

Here's a view of it from the roof of the hammam, to give the bath its proper name.

And here's the inside of the dome.

There are several rooms, each of which offered water of a different temperature.

The bath was built as a money-spinner for Wazir Khan's Mosque, which collected all the profits.

The great majority of the buildings in the Old City are new, but here's an older one.

Close-up. The striking feature, of course, is the jharoka, borrowed straight from the Hall of Public Audience in the Lahore Fort.

It looks fancy, but hold on. Here's a description of one such house; it comes from G.C. Walker's Gazetteer of Lahore, 1893-4. "The houses, though lofty and to all appearances well built from the outside yet inside are much cramped for space and ill-ventilated. They generally consist of three or four stories, built of burnt bricks laid in mortar. Very few have even a courtyard in front. On the basement floor is a small dark room, in which the women of the house spend most of their day, spinning, cleaning cotton, or working at their needles. Next to this room is a small cell, perhaps 5 or 6 feet square, in which the grain is soaked for cooking, generally by an old woman who has no other means of earning her livelihood. On the floor above is a small room used as a kitchen, from which perhaps a window opens out into a narrow alley outside, or a sky-light lets in light from above. Adjoining it are two small rooms (kothies)of which one is used for a general store-room and the other as a depository for the family valuables. The third floor generally has three sleeping rooms, all are very small and ill-ventilated and hemmed in on three sides by the walls of adjoining houses. In these also property can be stored and if necessary food is cooked. The fourth floor contains but one small room at the back, the remainder being an open place in front of a corner of which is a small latrine. This space and the open roof above are used as a sleeping shed; the latrine is the only convenience of the sort available to all residents of the house, male or female; an open drain (parnalah)leads down the front wall of the house into the alley below, where it is carried off by an open saucer gutter into the main drain in the adjoining street." (Quoted in Aijazuddin, 2003, p. 78.)

Change, change, change, helped along by encouraging words.

In this case an entrance hall hides a courtyard.

The entrance, with the owner's name: Pir Naseem Jada.

The courtyard.

Ground level.

The other side of the building, obliquely facing an open space.

This plaque, affixed to the wall of the same building, reads, in Hindi, "Commissioner Sita Ram Mehra, son of Sir Govind Ram, Advocate, High Court, Punjab." Did this family come before or after Pir Naseem Jada, whose name is on the other side of the building. If later, did the family migrate to India at partition or, unlikely though it is, choose to stay in Pakistan, where most Hindus after 1947 found it prudent to convert to Islam?

Across the courtyard, new buildings.

Walking through the streets, you see lots of new buildings.

Hints of the old: woven window screens.

The real continuity lies in the Old City's economic life, which as always is very public.